i’m eternally pissed off about this and need to vent. was watching the news tonight on two different channels – one has local news and very little world news, so i flip to the other channel to watch the bigger picture.
the one station – channel 11, was talking about a telethon they had this weekend to raise money for the new children’s hospital. our local gov’t is pitching in 3 billion dollars. the hospital still needs to match that with 3 billion. yes billion. so they have a fund raiser all weekend on tv and the local station pitches in with air time and reporters etc. Meanwhile, the other channel highlighted a story about local kids pitching in to raise money and awareness for national hunger week.
what bugs me? that channel 11 never talks about issues such as homelessness in our city, our hunger or poverty issues in our country, or the wars in darfur etc… they are more than willing to pitch in for children’s hospital, cancer foundation bikeathons, cops for cancer, united way stuff, but when its a poverty issue – forget it.
i used to think it was my imagination, but the more i view the newspapers, watch tv etc.. the more i’m convinced of what a short irishman said in an award ceremony years ago – if people in france were starving on even half the scale of those in africa, the world would be up in arms. If even 10 % of north americans were dying of HIV/AIDs or lack of clean drinking water, or malaria, the world would do anything to stop it. I truly believe the only reason we arent doing more is prejudice.
people such as you and I, we want to help and think the problems are insurmountable – what can we do? we’re just one person right? yes and no. we can do something to affect change in one person’s life and we’ve done something fantastic. we cant fix it on a large scale -you’re right. So many of us dont start, or even try. But we should we must hold our elected officials accountable for charity at home, charity across the board.
it bugs me that organizations like the cancer society get big bucks to spend – we’ve spent how many billions of dollars, and how many years of research and we’re no further ahead to prevention or cure? and i dont consider being poisoned, burned and diced up, a cure. Would we ever allow gov’t to throw that much money at Africa without results? I realize without research we’d still be in the dark ages… i realize we need the United Way, we need some of the various organizations and they do good or decent work.. but why is poverty such a four lettered word? we lump it in the same dark alley as homelessness and mental illness. just bugs me is all.
